Eric Fischer has found this awesome map showing the predicted average traffic density of US highways in 1944 (via Tim De Chant). Since they didn't have the GIS technology we have today, how do you think they did this?

Monday, January 28, 2013

A new podcast by S. Dubner talking about this working paper: "The Value of Bosses".
If you're curious about the answer but don't have much time to read the full paper, listen to the podcast or just read the abstract !

ps. I'm not sure if their findings could be applied to universities or research institutions. But why not?

It sounds palusbile, although it is not clear yet how deeply innovation levels are affected by demographics. Additionally, I'd say that the coming demographic changes are not likely to affect all levels of innovation (from smartphones and tablets to tomographs and clean energy) in the same way.

So here lies one question: Can current economic and demographic trends around the globe change the geography of innovation markets (both production and consumption) in the future?

Inspired by this, I've decided to ask: Who is the most cited author in Sociology of all time? I'll give you a hint. It is not E. Durkheim, nor K. Marx. It is not P. Bourdieu either, although he is close to the top of the list.

This ranking is based on Google Scholar Citations page. Of course there are unregistered authors, what makes this ranking very inaccurate (although I believe the two first positions are correct).**

Some of you might have heard of the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Basically, it's a tool that charts the usage of any word over time in published books (Google books database has over 20 million scanned books).

So this time, I have used it as as a proxy for the popularity of famous watchwords in Urban Planning, such as smart growth, compact city, new urbanism, creative class and world city.